Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
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Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy H8 Specialist accommodation for older people and those with specialised needs
Representation ID: 5460
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
The demographics of our area are different from other areas and it is recognised that our ageing population will grow during the plan period.
It is also clear that more specialist accommodation will be needed in our area for both married and single pensioners.
We support the outlined policy
Paras 5.53 – 5.58 suggest that CDC’s Planning team will have a significantly greater workload if they are to vet these applications for delivery on the essential detail. Are they sufficiently resourced? Do they have planners with this specialist knowledge?
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Support noted.
Support
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy P1 Design Principles
Representation ID: 5461
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
Admirable content, full of aspiration. Achievable? Demands substantial ongoing monitoring in real time.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Support and comment noted. Comment noted. Monitoring is addressed in Appendix F
Object
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy P2 Local Character and Distinctiveness
Representation ID: 5462
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
Legally compliant? Not specified
Sound? Not specified
Duty to co-operate? Not specified
Again lots of positive parameters but neither developers nor their contractors are sufficiently policed in respect of their actions at site.
Enforcement should be statutory and not a cost laid at the door of underfunded local councils.
Sites which are cleared of hedgerows and trees BEFORE planning applications are lodged should see the offenders fined when this is discovered.
We have a live example locally of a significant landowner having installed vicious barbed wire fencing and removed many hundreds of metres of mature undergrowth very recently and posted large signage suggesting that the land now fenced off is a nature conservation area.
Points 7. And 8. within Policy P2 will require serious policing if they are ever to be achieved.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
The Council understands the points made and certainly thinks that enforcement and preventing inappropriate site clearance is important. However, there are limits to what the Council can do in this regard as any development can clear their site, providing that doing so doesn’t breach relevant legislation or planning conditions or involve the removal of protected features such as TPOs. Unfortunately planning policies cannot change this situation. However, the new biodiversity net gain requirements should discourage such practices, as site clearance will then mean that extra BNG credits would be required, which would make it disadvantageous for developers purse such an approach.
Object
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy P3 Density
Representation ID: 5463
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
Legally compliant? Not specified
Sound? Not specified
Duty to co-operate? Not specified
Density of 35 dwellings per hectare is absolutely not appropriate in semi-rural areas.
The absence of any reference in the 7 point policy to the importance of both wildlife and biodiversity is absolutely shocking.
Regrettably, without some compulsory purchase orders to secure land for dedicated cycle routes and footpaths, the repeated message in this Draft Local Plan that homeowners must forego their cars and take to a bicycle or their feet will just not happen.
Our area is already crowded and vehicular traffic is growing and WILL NOT REDUCE until and unless regular, affordable rail and bus connections are IN PLACE. Wonderful idealistic thinking but very far removed from reality.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Objections noted. i) The Housing Density Evidence Study demonstrates the appropriateness of 35 dph as a minimum density expectation. Furthermore, the proposed P3 policy requires a design-led approach to be taken that considers site-specific constraints including surrounding context (such as a rural setting) to ensure that the optimum site density is appropriate. ii) P3 does not specify requirements relating to biodiversity so as not to duplicate or contradict requirements proposed within NE5. iii) Policies T1 and T2 propose how development be required to encourage sustainable travel and avoid or reduce need to travel by car. P3 does not attempt to duplicate these requirements but will support that approach by facilitating sustainable patterns of development.
Object
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy P4 Layout and Access
Representation ID: 5464
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
Legally compliant? Not specified
Sound? Not specified
Duty to co-operate? Not specified
We can only reiterate our earlier comments. The District is nowhere near in a position to provide an integrated public transport solution to its residents. There is no evidence in this Draft Local Plan of Future-Proof masterplan for the City of Chichester or the District. Policy P4 is thus unsound and smacks of Mission Impossible.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Objection and comments noted. The provision of an integrated public transport network and associated expectations on new development (including contributions) are reflected within policies T1 and T2. It is therefore considered unnecessary to duplicate these points within P4, which is principally concerned with design matters associated with development layout and access
Object
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy E6 Chichester City Centre
Representation ID: 5465
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
Legally compliant? Not specified
Sound? Not specified
Duty to co-operate? Not specified
Full of laudable aspirations and objectives. However, the Chichester Vision document dates back to 2017 and requires a very rapid 2023 update.
Much has changed in people’s lives since 2017. Our view is that any Vision has to be the product of a competitive tendering process and there has to be a substantial budget allocated to this process.
We are not aware of any visionary architects, landscape and environmental planners being in full-time employment of CDC. If they are there, why do we not hear from them?
Chichester should be the jewel in this part of West Sussex’s crown but it is increasingly a tarnished jewel.
City centres will need to become safe places for more people to live – and the accommodation will not be large, terraced or detached homes, but tastefully designed apartments.
There will be a need to establish a much better system of volume parking. Have underground car parks been considered?
Has ground floor parking with accommodation above been adequately used?
The Vision for Chichester 2023 should be the TOP PRIORITY for the newly elected District Council.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
The 2017 Chichester Vision remains the current version and the plan text should continue to refer to the Vision. The action plan relating to the Vision continues to be reviewed to ensure that it reflects the most appropriate projects
Support
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy E8 Built Tourist and Leisure Development
Representation ID: 5466
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
It is true that our district has a great deal to offer but there are massive holes in the fabric.
Infrastructure – roads, rail, bus, entertainment venue(s), hotel and other accommodation – all are lacking and are not up to the level of need or expectation of all ages of our demographic population.
There is no surprise that AirBnB has so successfully penetrated the tourism sector.
We do not yet know what will become of the former Army & Navy store but we have to hope and pray that the new use will be inspirational and not solely retail.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Support and comment noted
Support
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy E9 Caravan and Camping Sites
Representation ID: 5467
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
This is an important sector for tourism. Glamping is the most modern development and should surely be encouraged within the District in appropriate locations.
Water supply issues and the need for a region-wide water supply study will need to be seen as a top priority. Water for drinking etc. is a finite supply item and tourism inevitably loads the strain on our water supply network, particularly, if as is widely predicted global temperatures will rise much faster than predicted.
Quality of sites and their services is critical.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Comment noted.
Support
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
Policy E10 Equestrian Development
Representation ID: 5468
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
It is of deep concern to the residents of Chidham & Hambrook that CDC Planning has not applied the good intentions stated in Policy E10 when it comes to the proposal to develop the Willowbrook Riding School and Stables located at the north of our Parish.
To access this site, the developers will have to create a two vehicle wide bridge over the unique Ham Brook chalk stream. Only 2 of the proposed dwellings will actually be located in Hambrook BUT all the new homes will only be accessed via roads within the parish. The site for development lies extremely proximate to the connective Wildlife Corridor linking the harbour AONB with the SDNP. Our view is that the planning application should have been refused at the outset for these and many other reasons.
Equestrian activity is of great benefit to both fully fit and severely disabled people of all ages. It is a great community asset and Willowbrook should not be lost to greed.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
Support noted
Object
Chichester Local Plan 2021 - 2039: Proposed Submission
8.1
Representation ID: 5469
Received: 17/03/2023
Respondent: Mayday! Action Group
Number of people: 8
Legally compliant? Not specified
Sound? Not specified
Duty to co-operate? Not specified
To be attractive to businesses, residents and economically essential tourists, efficient, affordable, smooth-running and frequent rail and bus services are absolutely essential.
Regrettably our plan area is not well served by rail or bus services – but this is as much a national as it is a local issue.
We would not agree with the suggestion that we have adequate cycle and pedestrian routes. There has been a stop/start process on dedicated cycle routes along the A259 between Fishbourne and the Havant Borough border. It is a fact that seems not to be willingly acknowledged that the A259, whilst categorised as a ‘resilient road’ (because it is the only viable alternative which exists to take the traffic from the A27 when that vital transport artery – dual carriage road – is out of action (which is not an infrequent occurrence)
We would contend that in parts the A259 is too narrow to allow for separate pedestrian and cycle routes. It is very clearly dangerous to have cyclists riding at 20+mph on the same route as pedestrians of all ages and very often mothers with buggies.
Executive Summary
The Local Plan as written lacks ambition and vision, and will be detrimental to the landscape within which the district lies. It is a plan borne out of a need to produce a legal document which will satisfy the regulatory authorities. In terms of Urban Planning it fails “To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (NPPF).
The development that will consequentially arise from the deployment of such a made Local Plan is not sustainable. It will adversely affect the Character, Amenity and Safety of the built environment, throughout our district.
In particular, the Local Plan is inadequate for the needs of the people in the district both at present and in the future because –
1. It has been written in advance of the District having a properly formed and agreed Climate Emergency Action Plan. It is inconceivable that such a key document will not shape our Local Plan. It is this Action Plan that is needed first in order to provide the long-term strategic view as to how and what the District will look like in the future; this, in turn, will help form and shape the policies outlined in any prospective, Local Plan. The Plan as proposed is moribund, as a result of “cart before the horse” thinking.
2. The Local Plan as written does not adequately address how infrastructure, transport and services are going to be materially and strategically improved to meet the predicted growth and shift to a significantly ageing population. There is presently insufficient capacity to supply services and to have adequate people and environmentally friendly connectivity, as a direct result of decades of neglect towards investing in infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the District’s population. We are led to believe that developers through increased levies in order to gain permission to build will fulfil this need, but all that this will result in is an uncoordinated, dysfunctional mess completely lacking in any future-proof master planning approach. We contend that this will do nothing for the quality of life of Chichester District residents and it will create a vacuum whereby few if indeed any can be held accountable or indeed found liable for shortcomings in the future.
3. The Local Plan as written does not state how it will go about addressing the need to create affordable homes. The District Council’s record on this matter since the last made plan has been inadequate and now the creation of affordable homes has become urgent as political/economic/social factors drive an ever increasing rate of change within the District.
4. Flood risks assessments used in forming the Plan are out of date (last completed in 2018) and any decision to allocate sites is contrary to Environment Agency policy. Additionally, since March 2021 Natural England established a position in relationship to ‘Hold the Line’ vs. ‘Managed Retreat’ in environmentally sensitive areas, of which the Chichester Harbour AONB is a significant example. CDC have failed to set out an appropriate policy within the proposed Local Plan that addresses this requirement.
5. The A27 needs significant investment in order to yield significant benefits for those travelling through the East-West corridor; this is unfunded. Essential improvements to the A27 are key to the success of any Local Plan particularly as the city’s ambitions are to expand significantly in the next two decades. But any ambitions will fall flat if the A27 is not improved before such plans are implemented.. The A259 is an increasingly dangerous so-called ‘resilient road’ with a significant increase in accidents and fatalities in recent years. In 2011, the BBC named the road as the “most crash prone A road” in the UK. There is nothing in the Local Plan that addresses this issue. There is no capacity within the strategic road network serving our district to accommodate the increase in housing planned, and the Local Plan does not guarantee it.
6. There is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity in the District to support the current houses let alone more. The tankering of wastewater from recent developments that Southern Water has not been able to connect to their network and in recent months the required emergency use of tankers to pump out overflowing sewers within our City/District reflects the gross weakness of short-termism dominated thinking at its worst and is an indictment of how broken our water system is. The provision of wastewater treatment is absolutely critical and essential to the well-being of all our residents and the long-term safety of our built environment. The abdication by those in authority, whether that be nationally, regionally or locally, is causing serious harm to the people to whom those in power owe a duty of care and their lack of urgency in dealing properly with this issue is seriously jeopardizing the environment in which we and all wildlife co-exist.
7. Settlement Boundaries should be left to the determination of Parish Councils to make and nobody else. The proposed policy outlined in the Local Plan to allow development on plots of land adjacent to existing settlement boundaries is ill-conceived and will lead to coalescence which is in contradiction of Policy NE3.
8. All the sites allocated in the Strategic Area Based Policies appear to be in the majority of cases Greenfield Sites. The plan makes little, if any reference to the development of Brownfield sites. In fact, there is not a Policy that relates to this source of land within the Local Plan as proposed. Whilst in the 2021 HELAA Report sites identified as being suitable for development in the District as being Brownfield sites were predicted to yield over 4000 new dwellings. Why would our Local Plan not seek to develop these sites ahead of Greenfield sites?
9. The Local Plan does not define the minimum size that a wildlife corridor should be in width. What does close proximity to a wildlife corridor mean? How can you have a policy (NE 4) that suggests you can have development within a wildlife corridor? These exceptions need to have clear measures and accountability for providing evidence of no adverse impact on the wildlife corridor where a development is proposed. Our view is quite clear. Wildlife and indeed nature in the UK is under serious and in the case of far too many species, potentially terminal threat. Natural England has suggested that a Wildlife Corridor should not be less than 100metres wide. The proposed Wildlife Corridors agreed to by CDC must be enlarged and fully protected from any development. This is essential and urgent for those Wildlife Corridors which allow wildlife to achieve essential connectivity between the Chichester Harbour AONB and the South Downs National Park.
10. Biodiversity Policy NE5 - This is an absolute nonsense. If biodiversity is going to be harmed there should be no ability to mitigate or for developers to be able to buy their way out of this situation. This mindset is exactly why we are seeing a significant decline in biodiversity in the District which should be a rich in biodiversity area and why the World Economic Forum Report (2023) cites the UK as one of the worst countries in the world for destroying its biodiversity.
11. In many cases as set out in the Policies the strategic requirements lack being SMART in nature – particularly the M Measurable. These need to be explicit and clear: “you get what you measure”.
12. 65% of the perimeter of the District of Chichester south of the SDNP is coastal in nature. The remainder being land-facing. Policy NE11 does not sufficiently address the impact of building property in close proximity to the area surrounding the harbour, something acknowledged by the Harbour Conservancy in a published report in 2018 reflecting upon how surrounding the harbour with housing was detrimental to it long-term health. And here we are 5 years on and all of the organizations that CDC are saying that they are working in collaboration with, to remedy the decline in the harbour’s condition, are failing to implement the actions necessary in a reasonable timescale. CDC are following when they should be actually taking the lead on the issue. Being followers rather than leaders makes it easy to abdicate responsibility. There must be full and transparent accountability.
13. The very significant space constraints for the plan area must be taken into account. The standard methodology need no longer apply where there are exceptional circumstances and we are certain that our District should be treated as a special case because of the developable land area is severely reduced by the South Downs National Park (SDNP) to the north and the unique marine AONB of Chichester Harbour to the south. A target of 535dpa is way too high. This number should be reduced to reflect the fact that only 30% of the area can be developed and much of that is rural/semi-rural land which provides essential connectivity for wildlife via a number of wildlife corridors running between the SDNP and the AONB. Excessive housebuilding will do irretrievable damage to the environment and lead to a significant deterioration in quality of life for all who reside within the East / West corridor.
14. Many of the sites identified in the Strategic & Area Based Policies could result in Grade 1 ^ 2 farmland being built upon. The UK is not self-sufficient in our food security. It is short-sighted to expect the world to return to what we have come to expect. Our good quality agricultural land should not all be covered with non-environmentally friendly designed homes.
i) The strategy aims to improve the availability and frequency of public transport links as well as the performance of the A27 through junction improvements at Chichester.
ii) A key objective of policy T1 is to improve access to sustainable means of travel including public transport, walking and cycling.
The policy will lead to investment and planned improvements